For the final blog post of 2025, I wanted to look at a question that has come up regularly in the comments, and on psephological websites: how meaningful is the two-party-preferred vote, particularly in “teal” seats where Labor isn’t locally competitive, yet is either winning or coming close to winning the two-party-preferred vote.
In this post I am going to examine a number of different ways of considering whether voters who mark Labor ahead of the Liberal Party in these seats where the Liberal Party and ‘teal’ independents are competing, and thus the Labor preference does not impact the result. In general I find that the evidence suggests similar 2PP voting patterns in similar areas, whether they are classic Labor vs Liberal contests or Liberal vs independent contests.
For this blog post I am mostly focusing on the ‘teal’ seats which I define as Bradfield, Curtin, Goldstein, Kooyong, Mackellar, Warringah and Wentworth. Six of these seven seats were won by independents in 2025. Goldstein is a classic teal seat and had a sitting MP in 2025, so I’ll include it even though the Liberal Party won the seat. At times this blog post may also include Mayo and Indi in the analysis. These regional seats are also held by similar MPs, but as large regional seats have some significant differences.
All of these seats were, until relatively recently, strongholds for the Liberal Party. Labor had not seriously challenged these seats, but in recent years the rise of independents nicknamed ‘teals’ has seen the Liberal Party lose most of these seats. It has also produced a big increase in the two-party-preferred vote for the ALP.
This first chart shows the Labor two-party-preferred vote in the teal seats compared to the national 2PP, and there is a sudden uptick in 2019. It seems like the two-party-preferred vote first rose in seats with sitting crossbench MPs or a strong independent campaign in 2019: Mayo, Wentworth and Warringah.
There was discussion prior to the 2025 election about the meaning of the ALP gaining such a high two-party-preferred vote in these seats. The issue came up around Mayo MP Rebekha Sharkie’s discussion of her intentions in the case of a hung parliament. Sharkie did not seem to be aware that a majority of voters in her electorate had ranked Labor above Liberal.
This data could be used to argue about whether voters in a particular electorate would prefer a Labor government over a Coalition government in a hung parliament situation, and they have broader implications around where these electorates sit in Australia’s evolving political divisions.
But there has been scepticism from some psephologists around whether these numbers mean anything. I have heard this scepticism from Malcolm Mackerras and Antony Green amongst others. It can be hard to believe that places that were once so crucial to the conservative coalition could have moved so far so fast. I also saw some scepticism particularly focused on the idea that Labor won the 2PP in Bradfield, but that does appear to be true.
So what is the theory I am trying to test here? I think this is the best way to state the case.
In electorates where the main contest is between a Liberal and an independent, that is the focus of the voters’ choice. Thus they devote less thought to their remaining preferences, and a high Labor two-party-preferred vote does not reflect voters’ genuine intentions.
Of course we can’t know how people would vote in different circumstances, but I think we can test this hypothesis in a number of ways.
First of all, I want to examine two seats where a redistribution combined areas previously contained in a teal seat with neighbouring areas contained in a classic seat (in both cases, one won by the ALP in 2022 off the Liberal Party). These two seats are Bennelong and Kooyong.
Firstly, in the seat of Bennelong, this map shows the two-party-preferred swing in each booth in the electorate (you can also toggle to see the result).
The redistribution in Bennelong is quite easy to understand. The seat’s eastern border used to follow the eastern border of the City of Ryde, with the neighbouring Hunters Hill and Lane Cove council areas contained in Kylea Tink’s seat of North Sydney.
Labor did quite well on the 2PP in North Sydney in 2022, polling 48.7%. If the above theory was correct, you would assume that some of those voters who put Labor above Liberal on the 2PP did so in an unthinking way. You would then assume that when these areas were added to Bennelong (a seat with a sitting Labor MP) and they changed their focus to the Labor-Liberal contest, those areas would swing by less than the areas that were already in Laxale’s electorate. Yet that is not at all the case. The booths in Lane Cove fall well within the range of booths in the pre-existing part of the electorate. It is also very evidence in this scatterplot, where I have highlighted newly-added booths.
Next we turn our focus to Kooyong. The change was in the opposite direction: Kooyong took in a big chunk of Higgins. Both Kooyong and Higgins were demographically similar prior to the latter’s abolition, and you could have easily imagined a teal candidate winning in Higgins in 2022, but they did not run, and it was won by Labor’s Michelle Ananda-Rajah.
If the above theory was right, you could imagine that voters in those parts of Toorak would not focus so much on the Labor-Liberal contest, and would be free to preference Labor over Liberal. Yet that is not what happened. There was a swing to the Liberal Party in these booths, while the Labor 2PP went up across the rest of Kooyong.
Now there are other reasons why this might make sense – the sitting Labor MP did not run in the area after her seat was abolished, instead switching to the Senate. So the Labor campaign in that area would have been much diminished without a winnable contest. But still, it does show that two-party-preferred figures in teal seats do have a relationship with reality.
Next up, I am going to examine demographically-similar areas on either side of the border between a teal seat and a classic seat, in three areas.
Firstly, let’s go to the eastern suburbs of Sydney. This next map shows the two-party-preferred figures across Sydney, Wentworth and Kingsford Smith. You can also see the swings but I am now focusing on the absolute 2PP, since these are all areas where the independent has been present for at least two elections.
I’d like to draw your attention to the border of Wentworth and Kingsford Smith, which runs through the suburbs of Clovelly and Randwick. On the Kingsford Smith side of the border, the Labor 2PP is in the low 70s. On the Wentworth side, it is in the 50s. Now this is not surprising – Labor would have been far more active in Kingsford Smith and hold the seat. But this is not consistent with the above theory! Labor is winning a 2PP majority in Wentworth despite such a big drop-off in these areas!
Heading back to Kooyong, the south-eastern suburbs of Boroondara council are split between Kooyong and the classic seat of Chisholm, yet the 2PP is similar across this whole area.
And then returning to the northern suburbs of Sydney, you see similar trends cross the Bradfield-Berowra border around the Hornsby area. And there is a belt of strong Labor 2PP results (over 60%) stretching across the lower north shore from Lane Cove to the western half of North Sydney council. These booths were all previously contained in the teal seat of North Sydney, and are now split between three seats: two teal and one classic. Yet the 2PP is similar across the region.
Finally, I wanted to examine the Senate. We don’t have an easily-accessible equivalent to 2PP for the Senate, and I obviously can’t just compare Labor 2PP to Labor’s Senate primary. So I have grabbed the primary for both Labor and the Greens as the two main left-leaning parties running for the Senate.
There is a very strong relationship between these two metrics, outside of the ACT.
The teal seats are within the normal range of results, although they are at the lower end of the band.
The same is true for a handful of select neighbouring seats like Bennelong, Berowra, Chisholm and Kingsford Smith.
Interestingly, if the above theory had any truth, you’d expect these seats to be at the top of the band or higher, but they tend to have a relatively low Labor 2PP compared to the combined Labor-Greens two-party-preferred vote. Perhaps this does show that the lack of a strong local Labor sitting MP in those teal seats (as well as others like Berowra) is pushing the 2PP down, rather than it being inflated by another contest.
Another example to consider is the seat of Berowra. This seat is adjacent to Bradfield, and did experience a challenge from a teal independent in 2025. Tina Brown came fourth, with 11.4%, but Labor came surprisingly close to winning. They ended up on 48.4% of the two-party-preferred vote. This is entirely consistent with the Liberal Party losing ground to everyone to their left, Labor or independent, across northern Sydney.
Now, none of this is to say that I think Labor is about to win these seats. I think the independents are a more effective local opponent to the Liberal Party in those areas and will continue to win. But I do think that voters in a seat like Warringah, Wentworth or Bradfield are indicating something about their broader political leanings when they give a 2PP majority to Labor. These areas are becoming more progressive, it’s not just an artefact of an independent campaign. Analysts and politicians would be foolish to ignore this shift. I think local MPs should also be aware of the changing political make-up of their areas when they consider the wishes of their voters.
